David Palmer

Artist Works

Artist Bio

"David William Palmer can handle a paint brush, a big paint brush... his new paintings consist of a single stroke, at times up to 2 feet wide, undulating, swooping and knotting over a white ground...The breathless romanticism is typical of Palmer, the clarity and ambition of the single brush stroke shows him forging out in a new direction. And these are clear: dizzying, breathtaking, and pure as the sound of a struck bell. -Kate McQuaid, Boston Globe "Painter David Palmer creates huge, electric blue loops - each made in a quick, swoop of an actual 27 - inch brush - that are so deceptively perfect he"s had to point out the brush hairs embedded in the paint to prove they"re the work of man rather than machine. "A gentleman came up to me at a recent opening and tried to tell me that they were photographs," Palmer laughs. "He was very adamant. If it weren"t for the hairs, I wouldn"t have been able to convince him otherwise." Those errant hairs are perhaps the viewer"s best evidence that Palmers work isn"t created on a computer. Forget finding drips or wobbles on his 6"x 6" painting; "they"re unacceptable," Palmer says. But despite the artifice conveyed by the unnatural color and absence of imperfections, Palmer hasn"t had to defend his work as art - certainly not as much as the minimalist brushstroke and slash masters who preceded him. The Robert Rymans and Lucio Fontanas of modern art suffered the cynical, what is art conundrum; Palmer"s strokes are breathtakingly seductive and technically mystifying - so crucially human that he was spared the controversy previous brushstroke artist have faced. "When you see one in person, full- scale, you get a sense of the movement of the body that created it, of the mystery behind its creation," Palmer says, though he"s willing to divulge how meticulously he sketches and mentally choreographs each piece before ever setting foot in the studio to paint one - He"ll only spend seven to ten seconds on a stroke wiping out flawed iterations. He also reveals that his choice of acrylic as a medium instead of oil "dematerializes and flattens the work "to a photographic effect." -Moicak Hemsurov